living up to your resolutions

 


It is now new year 2013. So many of us have made our resolutions, even going so far as to make a resolution that we will stick to our resolutions--this time anyway! A resolution is just another word for 'promise', a resolve that we will do what we say. We start out all gung-ho, but by Valentine's Day many will have given up, citing lack of time, structure, commitment to other things, boredom...the list is endless.
This year, resolve to give more of yourself. To see the humanity in all of life. To be the one to change wrong to right. Be a hero. For inspiration, listen to Bette Midler sing the song, "Wind Beneath my Wings." Absorb what she is describing. Do you ever wish you could be someone else's source of support? What is stopping you? Start small and keep going. Soon it will become habitual. I cannot describe the joy I felt one day as I pulled up to the college door to pick up my son. As I waited, I noticed him standing there, holding the door open as several gals came out. He smiled at each one and my heart swelled with pride. He remembered what I had told him several years before; that is, a gentleman always holds a door for a lady.
Here is s a story that I read two days ago. I hope it speaks to your heart as we enter this new year of opportunity:

 Daddy's Angels

I wasn't paying attention at the time to the good example my father set. He wasn't consciously "setting a good example" -- he was just living life according to his values.

It was the 1950s in a small Middle Georgia farm town. Our family owned a clothing store in the middle of the main business block downtown. Six days a week, 8am until 6pm (9pm on Saturday), my father presided over his business. And sometimes an angel would come to our store.

I didn't recognize those visitors as angels. Neither did my mother, who accepted my father's decisions but referred to Daddy's angels as "bums". She was concerned that they painted hobo marks to guide others to my father. My father was, and still is, an extremely kind man. He bought them lunch.

I guess Daddy knew Mama's opinion and took precautions in case any individual "angel" might actually be an alcoholic. He would have a friendly, encouraging conversation with the person, who was shabby and obviously down on his luck.

Then Daddy would walk him across the street to the Coffee Cup Cafe and pay for him to eat the daily special, a hearty meal. Depending on how the conversation was going, Daddy would sometimes sit and have lunch with him.

Another variation on this theme was sometimes Daddy would bring the man to our house to do yard work to earn a bus ticket. Mama would feed him a good home cooked meal but would serve it to him in the kitchen or on the back steps.

Daddy explained his theory of angels to his children this way: "It's Biblical. Sometimes God sends an angel among men unawares, to test us. How we behave toward the least of his children is how we treat Him."

I remember chuckling at my "naive" father's actions later when I got more grown and more savvy. I laughed that he got it backwards about who the angel was.

Now that I am middle-aged, I'm proud to say that I realize how blessed I am to have such a wise and good man, Joseph Van Johnson, as my father and my teacher.

I am also doubly blessed to be meeting angels now myself. More than once I have recognized God Himself staring back at me from the face of a homeless mentally ill person. I understand now that my father was respecting the spirit of God that is within each of us.